I would believe blockchains to be islands. They all did it their way and occasionally people made attempts to transfer assets over weak bridges as they were required to. It was a success though it was always a clumsy affair, duct-taping ecosystems and wishing that nothing would break along the transition.
Then I began to hear about Midnight, and the thought of the partner chain was quite unexpected to me.
Midnight leverages other validators of Cardano instead of establishing a separate network with its own, with its own validators. Cardano SPOs operate Midnight nodes in addition to the existing operations by integrating staking. The operators are the same and the security is the same. There is no reason to persuade anyone to believe in a new system of validator that has not been tested before.
That’s a big deal. It is normally a nightmare to build security bottom up.
However, the interesting fact is that Midnight is not a sidechain. It is rather common infrastructure that retains its autonomy. Midnight is built on top of Cardano and its validators, although it is free to experiment with its own privacy features, tokenomics, and execution model. It is like leasing the engine of an already proven machinery and constructing your own custom body over it.
And in comparison to bridges this is less frail.
Bridges are a headache. Pledge one chain, mint wrapped on the other and hope the contract is not mishandled. We’ve all seen how that ends. Midnight turns that model around and provides it with privacy as a service. Privacy features are not only available without having to migrate everything to an isolated system. Other chains may communicate with Midnight directly, pay fees using their native tokens and utilize its privacy layer.
No wrapping. No weird asset copies. Just use it.
That strikes differently as a developer.
I have developed cross-chain systems previously, and half of the war is balancing between the SDKs, RPC peculiarities and totally different minds about each chain. It’s messy. The coming of Midnight, in particular with Compact, is one that feels as though someone considered the sanity of developers.
Compact is not out to modify your programming way. It conceals much of the complex cryptography and allows you to deal with established patterns, particularly when you have used TypeScript. That in itself reduces the learning curve considerably. You need not struggle with the tooling prior to commencing the construction.
Next is the pricing model which may seem tiresome unless you have been swindled by gas costs.
The dominant type of gas system is used in most of the chains. The network is strained by everything, despite the fact that various operations put a different focus. Midnight attempts a multi-dimensional pricing model - which is essentially charging resources according to their actual utilization.
It is a little paper point, yet in reality it might result in less unexpected things and higher predictability. We do not talk enough about that.
It is the greater picture that I found to be memorable.
This is not about creating another chain and hoping that people change. It is regarding the realization that the future is multi-chain and building it that way. The security base is offered by Cardano. The addition of Midnight provides a privacy layer which is programmable. Other ecosystems do not need to abandon their tokens or infrastructure in order to be able to plug in.
There is a different angle of cooperation.
I have seen too many projects contesting over using the same user base, liquidity division, and recreating the same tools iteratively. This is the reverse of the strategy. Share the things that would be reasonable, consensus, and compete at the point of the actual difference such as features and developer experience.
In case privacy issues are not short-term, like it will be, it cannot remain on a single isolated chain.
It has to be everywhere.